The Engagement Rate

An industry bulletin for marketing pros.

Hello! The Oscars are coming up this weekend. Influencers are dusting off their ring lights and mics for another foray of opportunities. Who are you looking forward to seeing or winning the most? 

Influencer & brand wins of the week 🏅

🏆And the Oscar goes to…

TikTok has partnered with the Oscars, selecting #FilmTok creators Joe Aragon and Yasmine Sahid as red carpet correspondents for the 96th Oscars, where they will host a livestream as part of TikTok's collaboration with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and Disney Entertainment, amid a surge of 1.7 million videos under the hashtags #FilmTok and #MovieTok this year.

✨Just some finishing touches

Interior designer, Emily Shaw, has been documenting her home renovation for over a year. Ikea recently sent across a desk and seating for her office to add some finishing touches and featured an in-store display inspired by her social content. 

🍗Chicken shop girl makes new leaps 

Ahead of her official ‘red carpet correspondent’ gig at this year’s Oscars, Amelia Dimoldenberg scored an upgrade in her widely popular chicken shop content series - hosting a special series with A-list stars including Billie Eilish and Marc Ruffalo. 

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Stopping the Gen Z doom scroll with influencer marketing

Ad Age’s Gen Z Summit hit New York City this week bringing together some of the best thought-leaders across influencer marketing to help audiences learn how to connect and understand Gen Z audiences. It’s quite clear the landscape is shifting, Gen Z audiences are more suspicious of the true intentions of branded content and can smell bullshit a mile away, so to speak. Brands that rest on the laurels of creating ‘millenial-esque’ content will see far little reward in stopping a Gen Z doom scroll. As many speakers at the summit highlighted, it’s going to take a palette cleanse of idea generation to get results. Here’s some key takeaways: 

👉Throw polished personas of macro-influencers reading off scripted brand messages in the trash! Gen Z is not captivated by inaccessible figures but rather look for authenticity and relatability as key drivers.

👉Gen Z consumers find small-scale creators tend to better align with their values and interests than someone with a mass following. 

👉It’s crucial to move away from the “pay to play” mentality. Long-term partnerships and collaborative content creation foster a genuine relationship, making influencers feel like an integral part of the brand's fabric. These creators want the content to succeed just as much as marketers do, and investing in these relationships pays off in the form of successful and resonant campaigns.

👉Influencers play a pivotal role in helping brands enter niche subcultures that matter to Gen Z. Collaborations with creators in specific niches, be it anime, gaming, or other internet subcultures, allow brands to reach corners of the internet that traditional advertising might miss. 

All in all, to truly engage with Gen Z, it's essential to adapt to their viewing habits, integrating influencers into various forms of content, from sports coverage to entertainment, creating a more immersive and authentic brand experience. Take it from me, trying too hard will only come across to Gen Z audiences as your great nanna trying to read the urban dictionary for the first time. 

“Brand lift” - the success metric

Measuring ROI for influencer marketing campaigns has always been a bit of a rubix cube, unique to each brand with hundreds of different ways to define success. Data and insights company ThisThat recently shone light on the concept of ‘brand lift’ as an indicator that brands need to adopt. 

“While advertising has evolved, measurement hasn’t, making it near impossible to understand how performance compares across different channels.” says ThisThat founder Max Osborne. “Guesswork is wasteful and fuels ad destain; it’s too big of a risk for ROI and no longer excusable. It’s the industry’s biggest pain. But we’re solving this. Marketers need to be able to compare channels. With more and more advertisers turning to brand lift, having benchmarks to know what ‘good’ looks like eliminates guesswork for our clients.”

Here’s what we know: 

👉Brand lift measures a campaign's impact by comparing responses from two groups: one exposed to the campaign and one not. 

👉ThisThat's gamified surveys collect data from ads across all channels, offering transformative insights at any campaign touchpoint.

👉Results provide brands with clear insights into the customer journey, allowing optimization across the entire funnel.

👉ThisThat's data enables benchmarking for influencer marketing, showing it's 2.07 times more effective for awareness and 2.78 times for message recall.

👉It excels in other areas too: word-of-mouth (1.77x), association (1.74x), preference (1.49x), and familiarity (1.43x).

These benchmarks offer a strategic blueprint for using influencers effectively, find out more.